Future Fossils

It's about time! Provocative, profound discussions at the intersection of art, science, and wonder with paleontologist-futurist Michael Garfield and a growing list of awesome guests...
A podcast for the future archeologists digging through our digital remains. Conversations of the unconventional, bizarre, free-roaming, fun, irreverent, and thoughtful kind...an auditory psychedelic to get you prepared for living in a wilder future than we can imagine.
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The possibility of a virtual nation, a modern silk road of digital nomads moving in between communities…

…but the issues with that, primarily its unsustainability, and the importance of working to create local communities and tribes.

The tension between freedom and fullness of living, independence and interdependence as valued differently by different societies.

What does it truly mean to be free and to have a society that promotes freedom?

How our individual drives are sculpted by the agencies of our environments and the people with whom we surround ourselves – so even the drive for independence is a symptom of our interrelatedness.

The challenge of building a decentralized society of loners and how culture itself may be the one true technological solution.

“My thinking about what I want to work on in the world has headed from initially thinking, ‘Oh, climate change is the most important thing to be focusing on right now, obviously,’ to ‘Maybe we can’t really resolve our climate issues without changing capitalism and changing our economic system that requires constant growth,’ and ‘Oh, well, maybe we can’t actually change our economic system without a culture that changes people’s relationships with each other, and with money, and with the world.”

“I think a lot of individual work, personal growth work, each one of us doing our own work to resolve the things in us that prevent us from living our most enlivened selves and bringing our gifts into the world, is really important.”

How Charles Eisenstein helps us articulate the core problems of, and potential solutions to, the crisis of our current age:

From separation to oneness, from scarcity to abundance.

The crisis of imagination that we don’t think it’s possible for our planet to provide for everyone.

Universal Basic Income - how it could liberate us to get culture right, or how it could be poorly implemented and create new problems.

Charles Stress’ novel Singularity Sky as one example of how unprecedented sudden affluence can ruin a society.

Might it not be for a very good reason that massively disruptive technologies we WANT (like free energy) are being (or ought to be) WISELY suppressed by the system (and/or ruling classes)?

Ramez Naam’s Nexus Trilogy as a model for how society might variously adopt and resist disruptive technologies – how technological telepathy specifically might be used by a variety of different factions, and suppressed by nation-states that want whatever vestige of control remains in eras of extraordinary change…

Tamera Healing Biotope in Portugal and their experiments in community living, the healing of interpersonal issues, processing group needs, and building toward a future that includes and nourishes us all.

The role of fearless love and re-imagined intimate relationships in new modes of community designed for peace.

The difficulty of making powerfully positive but culturally unusual steps toward love free from fear.

The Sex 3.0 Wiki and understanding sexuality as a cultural phenomenon shaped by the distributed agency of our technological surround – the enclosure and ownership of land, paternity, etc. all contributing in big ways to our current preference for monogamous mate claiming partnership.

The relationship between digital society (with its emphasis on sharing everything) and the resurgence of nonmonogamy.

Mystics and Moralists as two responses to change.

The plurality of belief systems, adaptability, and resilience.

“We can embrace the fullness and complexity of everything that’s happening in a balanced way that I believe will lead to a much more harmonious way of being on the planet.”

Moving out of an age of answers and into an age of questions…

The invention of Inheritance Day and the awesome idea of a new holiday in which we honor our ancestors and realize that we, too, are ancestors.

And lastly, just a dash of speculation on the Simulated Universe Theory and our participation in what Tibet calls “this fractal godhood…”

“If the future is watching, then don’t you want to say something valuable?” – MG

“It’s just all what is. And I accept every state of being as glorious.”

Two dedicated truth-seekers and cosmos-abiders make a lot of dirty jokes and somehow manage to harmonize their angles on the practice of rigorous inquiry into the nature of reality and consciousness…

We have a totally tangential, irreverent, penetrating conversation. (Luckily for you it’s audio only.) Somehow it all hangs together…much like Cory and I would, if they ever found out about the unrecorded parts of this chat. (Kidding!)

• The paradox of having a podcast that emphasizes memory and continuity having SO. MANY. RECORDING. GLITCHES. Bizarre plumage that doesn’t fossilize and how truly precious little we know of the ancient world.

• Cory Allen’s “creepy” super intense memory – and memory versus recordings – isn’t it kind of wrong to rely on recordings to justify or validate the way we feel right now?

• Feathered dinosaurs screwing up our whole perception of dinosaurs as monsters. Scales versus feathers and how humans are so quick to judge based on the surfaces…

“Got a face? We’ll give you the time of day. Worms? You’re going to be laboratory experiments. Snakes? We’re going to use you as a symbol for evil in the entire course of Western Religion because you have no arms and legs. You’ve got a face, but you’re the face of evil. Try again. But rabbits? Dogs? Cats? We take care of them because they’re furry.”

• Encountering the dragon on the edge of the map and realizing that it’s you…versus not being able to see the faces of the people you’re firing on as a drone pilot. The closer you get to “it” the more it is you.

• The value of noticing our projections and how we colonialism the world “out there” with our own ideas and imaginations. Everything we think about HUMAN consciousness is just CONSCIOUSNESS.

• Taking the human element out of consciousness.

• Vocabulary Word: Allopoeisis: the process of becoming the other.

• Talking with animals to explore the nature of consciousness from as far beyond our human filter as we can. (How much are we anthropomorphizing Koko the Gorilla’s command of language?)

• Watch out for clamping down on the word “is” when trying to relate your personal experience…as soon as you’re talking about “how it is” you’re not paying attention to your own subjectivity and recognizing its role in your experience.

• We never see beyond the virtual reality of our nervous system, but it’s also the case that there is no separation between self and other in the ecosystem that precipitates “them” “both.”

“On the one hand you can never really know the other. On the other hand, you never know anything BUT the other.”

“Because you ARE the other.”

“Right.”

• Seeing through the academic pretense of objectivity to the necessity of describing the full details of your instruments (including your own nervous system) used in your experiments. The impossibility of perfectly replicating an experiment. Data from studies of psi phenomena show self-verifying results dependent on the belief sets of the experimenter – both positive and negative – even in very tightly controlled and blinded studies.

• The politics, stress, absurdity, and pressure of the academic world and how it inhibits the very exploration to which it’s devoted. Cory’s friend who worked on the roundworm C. elegant and the nature of his research…and near-madness undergoing the completion of his PhD program.

• The social construction of knowledge: this is where “facts” come from, people!

• “School” and “Scholar” comes from a word that meant “leisure.”

• The more narrowly focused our attention, the more we have to compete for one another’s attention. The social ills of the filter bubble. The diminishment of chance encounters and surprise interactions because of our constricted and self-reinforcing “reality tunnels.”

• The Nutcracker is an awesome, very self-aware ballet…which Cory would have never seen if he hadn’t gotten outside of his own bubble.

• The documentary “Century of the Self” and how marketing has gone from advertising products to advertising lifestyles and appealing to the consumer’s ego.

• How diversity and redundancy are essential to the health and vitality of society (as with any ecosystem). How we NEED oppositional perspectives to enrich the whole – and what would happen if Trump and Clinton supporters could recognize this? When will this be common sense?

• Michael’s spiritual practice of listening to radio stations he wouldn’t ordinarily choose and finding out why millions of people tune in and enjoy those stations.

“You can appreciate it without liking it.”

“You have to look at it long enough until you see yourself in it.”

• Advertising fake products from the future.

• The intimacy of evolution and extinction, entropy and complexity.

• Astrosexuality and the CRISPR-induced end of identity politics. The future of identity: radically creative and diverse, or a mushy bowl of oatmeal?

“I think everyone will become so nuanced in their identity that it becomes a tapestry…everyone’s going to be SO individual that we’re all going to be exactly alike.”

• If your social media followers were actually following you around in the street, and you had to turn around and talk to however many of them, how would that change the way you think about your platform as a creator? (“How would it change what you’re saying and how absurd it is?”)